In recent years, natural user interfaces for natural inputs like speech and handwriting have become more popular. These interfaces rely on recognition technologies, typically those that recognize patterns in speech or handwriting. Speech input tends to be efficient but not very robust against noise or other adverse environmental noise conditions. On the other hand, handwriting input is slower but more reliable. With respect to East Asian characters (e.g., Chinese characters), many characters have similar pronunciations, which can confound recognition and impact reliability. As for handwriting, many East Asian characters are too complicated to be written rapidly. For such reasons, attempts have been made to develop bi-modal (handwriting and speech) input systems for East Asian characters that can build off the strengths of each approach.
Various exemplary techniques discussed herein rely on handwriting as input or a combination of handwriting and speech as inputs. Such techniques allow for reliable and efficient character recognition.